CEOCFOinterviews – How long have you been with the company?

Dr. Blackwell –I have been with the company since the beginning, it was founded in 1986.  Datastream was a part of another company that was a start-up also.  This company was bought out by a large utility.  Datastream was in effect put on the block and we were able to buy it and build it from there. 

Dr. Blackwell – We started out as a small software company and our focus was on maintenance.  When I say maintenance I’m talking about companies taking care of their assets.  Back then, our focus was a little narrower, we talked primarily about maintenance of those assets and today we talk about asset management.  Our real focus is just like in your automobile you have to change the oil filter and the oil to make sure that your car performs efficiently, we do those same kinds of things.  We manage that information for large corporations.  

CEOCFOinterviews – It’s not just providing the software, but you actually provide your customer with all the support they need from start to finish, and some.

Dr. Blackwell – Many customers want single source responsibility.  On the other hand, there are a lot of customers that have one of the big five systems integrators and we work with them. We do it both ways; it really depends on how the client wants to do it. Certainly, we do perform start-up, installation, maintenance consulting, which is a whole turn-key type operation for all asset issues. At the same time we also work with our partners and turn the implementation side of it over to those partners as well.

CEOCFOinterviews – Do you have the manpower to do this?

Dr. Blackwell –We try not to do all the somewhat simpler issues like start-up and installation. We sometimes do that outside. Again on the other side, it’s nice to have that reservoir of partners or alliances in back of us for when we do run into larger projects where the execution of those are held back by local resource constraints. 

CEOCFOinterviews – How important are those partnerships?

Dr. Blackwell – The further we get into this business, the more important it is. One of the things we’ve really focused on is increasing deal size and volume. At the head of that list is development of alliances.  We’re working with a lot of companies to develop those relationships.  What we bring to it is opportunity for the integrators to serve their customer base.  At the same time, we can provide the software and so it’s a good marriage for us. 

CEOCFOinterviews – How do you get your customers?

Dr. Blackwell – When we started this business we were at the low end of the market.  The good news is that gave us well over 55,000 customer sites and a lot of those turned into leads that we moved up to larger systems.  Our focus today is on tier one— defined as $500 million revenue and above. In parallel with that we’ve also moved onto a single platform so alliances are definitely important, vertical markets are important, and to serve those vertical markets at the high end we are on a single platform, Oracle.

CEOCFOinterviews - You’ve opened new offices and you have worldwide customer installation reach. Exactly what areas do you cover?

Dr. Blackwell – One of the things you learn after you do a couple of acquisitions is that you’re just getting started when you sign the papers.  One of the things we acknowledge is that we need worldwide coverage. In Asia, we have offices in China, Singapore and Australia. In Latin America we have offices in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and San Paolo, Brazil.  We have four or five offices in Europe.  That gives us good coverage that allows us to serve the tier one customer base that, as a rule, is a global type organization. 

CEOCFOinterviews – How many products do you have now?  Do you see your company building on the existing products or do think you will come up with new ones?

Dr. Blackwell – Two years ago we had seven products on five platforms.  Today we have two major products on one platform.  You can see there are a lot of changes.  Our focus has been on Web-based products so we do have truly web-architeched products today and that’s been a real opportunity.  Maintenance is really important but it’s not so glamorous.  So how do you get some ones attention and how do you differentiate your company?  I think we’re one of the only companies in our market that has truly web-architected products today.  The nice thing is that as well as the Web, we’re seeing a lot of ASP opportunities.  Large companies don’t want to buy an additional server, they don’t want to add a database administrator, and they don’t want to administer all those issues that go along with taking a new application. We’re hosted on UUnet so we have large pipes, with about 400 seats right now in ASP and we will continue to see that growing significantly. That’s all brought about by the opportunities on the Internet. 

CEOCFOinterviews – As far as acquisitions, do you see additional ones coming in the future?

Dr. Blackwell – I think the idea with acquisitions was to get global coverage and right now we are in the process of building a real business internationally.  To change cultures and to get everyone to thinking on the same sheet of paper has been a challenge.  We’re just about there now; we started making acquisitions in January of 1997.  Here we are four years later, with a good management team, smoothly functioning offices and people who are in sync with what we’re doing.  So acquisitions are pretty much status quo. 

We are focusing on products, product quality, and the ability to focus on one platform so we can write our core code and have efficient development.  The other area we are looking at is, of course, electronic commerce. There is a natural fit with asset management and that’s the ordering of spare parts. For many years now, people have ordered spare parts through our purchasing module and now they are doing that over the Internet through our product called iProcure. We did about $1 million of orders in 1999 and in 2000 we had over $13 million.  So we see that growing rapidly.  I think that’s a $300 billion market and we’re pretty excited about that as well.

CEOCFOinterviews – What are your feelings on all the competition?

Dr. Blackwell – Again, we’re just trying to go back to our user base and focus more on electronic commerce. If someone wants to order a spare part, the order is generated in the maintenance department. Even if the customer has selected another company to do their automated purchasing, they still have to get the order from maintenance.  So one way or the other, we have a great opportunity there that is built into the lifecycle of maintenance where you buy parts, distribute those parts, the parts get consumed and you order more and that’s all done through the asset management cycle.  A lot of companies are out there and they’re just a transaction organization.  We have a natural, built in (e-Commerce) because all orders or spare parts start with a work order. What we’re looking for here are those fresh insights and the other focus for us is getting a great management team.  Ralph Carter came onboard as our Chief Operating Officer about five months ago.  We have a new Vice President for our services. We’ve almost rebuilt our management team; getting more experienced people, people who have already done it once or twice which was a change from where we were three and four years ago when we were looking at lower tier markets. 

CEOCFOinterviews – Does this company have the cash and credit to go forward? 

Dr. Blackwell – We were cash flow positive last quarter.  We’ve got a little over $25 million dollars in cash and cash equivalents.  So that’s growing, it’s not going down. In addition, we have seen tremendous growth in license sales of our core products, MP5i 35% sequential and 100% year over year. This is sufficient today and we’re increasing that as we are going forward.